Philosophy and Science Fiction
Course Description: Is time travel possible? What would it be like to teleport? Could a robot be conscious? Would you survive having your mind "uploaded" to a computer? How do you know you're not dreaming right now? Are we living in a computer simulation? These are some of the questions raised by both philosophers and science fiction writers. Philosophers typically make interesting claims about issues that appear, at least at first glance, to be far removed from commonplace experience. Science fiction often deals with similar issues with more immediacy but less precision. Studying philosophy through science fiction allows us to retain the precision of philosophy and the immediacy of science fiction. In this course we will examine the works of science fiction (in film, television, literature, and social media) and the philosophical debates that their work gives rise to. Students will become familiar with philosophical issues in epistemology and metaphysics, including: Artificial Intelligence, consciousness, teleportation, mind-uploading, computer simulation of reality, and time travel.
Students will construct pages for the class wiki. These assignments constitute the core learning tool of the course. Since different students have different interests and reasons for taking this course, the assignment can be completed in various ways. The overall goal is to engage with the philosophical concepts, claims, and arguments through the lens of science fiction. There are several ways to accomplish this. A student might use a work of science fiction as offering a thought-experiment or "intuition-pump" that supports or rebuts a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of, e.g. mind, consciousness, personal identity, or time. Another student might construct a page that looks at a particular piece of sci-fi and hypothesizes how one of the philosophers we've read would respond to it. Yet another approach would take a source text as putting forward a particular thesis or even making an argument and then assess it according to various standards: Is the work presenting a coherent picture of the phenomena (e.g. time-travel, mind-uploading, etc.)? What philosophical assumptions is it making and are they plausible? A student may even write a piece of science fiction themselves or make a short film that illustrates a particular problem, concept, claim, or argument in philosophy. The point is to articulate the philosophical content of the sci-fi as much as possible. And as is always the case when working on-line, the use of multi-media is strongly encouraged.
Students will construct pages for the class wiki. These assignments constitute the core learning tool of the course. Since different students have different interests and reasons for taking this course, the assignment can be completed in various ways. The overall goal is to engage with the philosophical concepts, claims, and arguments through the lens of science fiction. There are several ways to accomplish this. A student might use a work of science fiction as offering a thought-experiment or "intuition-pump" that supports or rebuts a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of, e.g. mind, consciousness, personal identity, or time. Another student might construct a page that looks at a particular piece of sci-fi and hypothesizes how one of the philosophers we've read would respond to it. Yet another approach would take a source text as putting forward a particular thesis or even making an argument and then assess it according to various standards: Is the work presenting a coherent picture of the phenomena (e.g. time-travel, mind-uploading, etc.)? What philosophical assumptions is it making and are they plausible? A student may even write a piece of science fiction themselves or make a short film that illustrates a particular problem, concept, claim, or argument in philosophy. The point is to articulate the philosophical content of the sci-fi as much as possible. And as is always the case when working on-line, the use of multi-media is strongly encouraged.